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INAUGURAL ADDRESS 



BY 



SAMUEL HARRIS. 



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INAUGUKAL 



ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BY 



P 



SAMUEL HARRIS 



AT HIS INDUCTION INTO 



THE PKESIDENCY OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE, 



3l«jjtt0t 6, 1S67. 




BRUNSWICK : 
JOSEPH GRIFFIN. 

1867. 



•ST 



J 



BOWDOIN COLLEGE, AUG. 8, 1867. 

At a meeting of the Association of the Alumni of Bowdoin College 
this day held, it was unanimously voted, that the Alumni present their 
thanks to President Harris for his very able and acceptable Inaugural 
Address, and request a copy for publication. 

Also, that His Excellency Gov. Chamberlain, with Hon. Samuel P. 
Benson, and the Rev. J. O. Fiske, be a Committee to carry this vote into 

effect. 

Attest, 

J. B. Sewall, 

Secretary. 



BRUJNSWICK, AUG. 10, 1867. 
REV. SAMUEL HARRIS, D.D. 

President of Bowdoin College. 
Dear Sir : 

In compliance with the accompanying vote the un- 
dersigned have the honor to request a copy of your Inaugural Address 
for publication. 

We trust that you will in this way allow a wider influence to that 
noble exposition of sound scholarship, the spirit of which is to characterize 
the College over which you are called to preside. 
"We are with high respect, 

Your friends and servants, 

J. L. Chamberlain, 
Samuel P. Benson, 
John O. Fiske. 



BOWDOIN COLLEGE, AUG. 30, 1867. 

Gentlemen : 

I thank the Alumni for their kind reception of my 
Inaugural Address, and transmit a copy for publication. 
With much respect, 

Sincerely yours, 

Samuel Harris. 
His Excellency Governor Chamberlain, 
Hon. S. P. Benson, 
Rev. J. O. Fiske, 

Committee. 



INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 



It is a German legend that the emperor Charle- 
magne returns every spring to bless the German land. 
Up and down the Rhine he walks, flinging his blessing 
on gardens, vineyards and fields, to make the seed 
spring up and to multiply the vintage and harvest. 
The significance of the legend is realized in every an- 
niversary of a well-ordered institution of learning. As 
the college sends out its successive classes of trained 
and cultivated minds, it is its venerated founders, be- 
nefactors, and supporters who reappear in the scenes 
of their life-long interest to fling their blessing on 
the land which they loved and served, to quicken 
every healthful growth, and to multiply the ingath- 
ering of human joy. The trust now committed to me 
I seem to receive, not merely from you who are now 
the supervisors of the College, but rather from the 
departed good who have given of their property for 
its endowment, or consecrated to it the loving and self- 
denying work of their lives. It is an admonition to 
faithfulness, a stimulus to endeavor, an incentive to 



courage, a pledge of success. An institution, which 
by its living growth has organized into its own being 
the faith and love, the prayers and benefactions, the 
self-denial and toil, of noble men for two generations, 
deserves to live, and is not likely to die. It deserves 
and will reward the like precious offerings in time to 
come. 

The occasion determines my subject. I must speak 

Of THE NECESSITY, THE IDEA AND THE METHODS OF COLLEGIATE 
EDUCATION. 

I. The necessity of collegiate education. 

There is a floating impression that the diffusion of 
knowledge is all that is needed in a Republic. Already 
enthusiastic editors have predicted a good time coming 
when books will no longer be published or read, and 
the newspaper will be the only and the sufficient lite- 
rature. 

But the fountains of knowledge must be full, or the 
streams will not flow. Diffusion presupposes concen- 
tration. It is easy to say that the fruitfulness of the 
earth depends on the general diffusion of moisture. 
But the moisture must first be condensed by the 
mountain tops and gathered into springs that feed 
the streams. Colleges are the mountain tops which 
fill the fountains whence knowledge is diffused. 

Besides, science is different in kind from popular 
knowledge. For example, beneath the popular know- 
ledge of Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry or Mineralogy 



lies hidden, like the skeleton within the body, a, com- 
plicated frame-work of mathematics. Not only the 
savans who perpetuate and enlarge science, but the 
teachers and authors who diffuse it, and the profes- 
sional men who apply it must have scientific as distin- 
guished from popular education. 

Men, also, of thoroughly trained intellects and of 
rich literary culture are indispensable to the welfare 
of society. The civilization which has ceased to pro- 
duce them is already effete. 

Without this liberal education, charlatanism and 
quackery will displace science and skill in the profes- 
sions, the demagogue will usurp the place of the states- 
man, the disorganizer that of the philanthropic re- 
former, and instead of popular intelligence and the 
diffusion of useful knowledge, will gradually come in 
the diffusion of popular delusion and superstition. 

Especially in this country thorough and complete 
collegiate education is needed to counteract the tenden- 
cy to superficiality pervading and enfeebling Ameri- 
can civilization. 

It may not be unnecessary even to insist that col- 
leges are congenial with a democracy. Side by side 
in the class-room sit the son of poverty and the son of 
wealth, the boy delicately and luxuriously reared and 
the sun-browned laborer, the youth of genteel and 
polished manners and the youth having no ac- 
quaintance with the graces. The conceit of one, the 
boorishness of another, the bashfulness of another are 



8 

worn away. The one standard of reputation and in- 
fluence is talent, scholarship and manly merit. There 
is no community more thoroughly democratic in its 
influences, or in which the determination of a man's 
standing is more free from factitious distinctions and 
tests. 

But this is not all. Colleges are indispensable to 
democratic civilization. The culture incident to aristo- 
cratic birth is lacking. "VVe cannot replace it with a 
coarse aristocracy of wealth. Then we must have in- 
stead the culture of thorough education. 

The very rapidity of the national growth demands 
it The rapid advance of population into the wilder- 
ness has created in the West a peculiar type of Ameri- 
can civilization, characterized by rapidity of thought, 
strength of conviction and energy of action ; but cer- 
tainly not by thoroughness of education, breadth of 
knowledge, or richness of culture. Out of it have 
arisen politicians uneducated in the schools, but earnest 
and strong. Because a few of these have won public 
confidence, the people have been ready to jump to the 
conclusion that a lack of early and thorough edu- 
cation is a positive recommendation for high office. 
Time will teach us better. It will expose the narrow- 
ness, one-sidedness and incompleteness of half-educated 
men, however strong. It will demonstrate that even 
Western civilization,with all its daring and energy, can- 
not successfully override the universal law which de- 
mands thorough training, broad information and deep 
culture for the wise administration of affairs. 



This higher education is also needed to quicken, 
guide and purify human progress. Our own his- 
tory is an example. In the earlier period of Massa- 
chusetts and Connecticut colonies, it was ascertained 
that about one in every one hundred and fifty in- 
habitants was a graduate either of Oxford or Cam- 
bridge. The great reformations of the past originated 
with men trained in the Universities. Wickliffe was 
acknowledged to be "incomparable in scholastic stud- 
ies." Huss at the age of twenty was professor in 
the University of Prague. Reuchlin at the same age 
taught philosophy, Greek and Latin at Basle. The 
others, who, like these, bear the sad but sublime title 
of "Reformers before the Reformation," were trained 
in the highest education of their time. Luther and 
the leaders of the Protestant reformation were " col- 
lege-learned" men. Bilney, Tyndal, Fryth, — young 
men praying over their Greek Testaments at Cam- 
bridge and Oxford — conveyed the spiritual power of 
the Reformation to England. John Knox was a scholar 
and a teacher at St. Andrew's. The Puritan leaders 
need only be named to prove the indebtedness of that 
movement to the universities. Methodism originated 
in the highest seats of learning in Great Britain. 
Nothing can be more erroneous than the common as- 
sertion that reforms originate with the uneducated 
and work upward. History declares that the ideas 
and movements which transform the world have ori- 
ginated with men of the highest education, often be- 



10 

fore they had left the schools ; that they have usually 
been proclaimed by such men before the people were 
ready to receive them, and often at the price of perse- 
cution and martyrdom. Thus it has been truly said, 
Tell me what some scholar is thinking in the solitude 
of his study today, and you tell me what in the next 
generation will be the watchword of progress and the 
staple of the hustings. 

II. The Idea of a College. 

The college, and the university in which the pro- 
fessional schools are included, imparting scientific edu- 
cation and liberal culture, must be distinguished from 
the common schools, and equally from each other. 
The precise idea of the college must be accurately de- 
termined in order to correct crude notions as to what 
its studies should be and what it may reasonably be 
expected to accomplish for its students. 

The college 'is preparatory to the professional 
school. It aims to develop the man, to ground him 
in the principles of knowledge, and to make him ac- 
quainted with its methods and instruments. The pro- 
fessional school and the school of industry and arts, 
aim to impart the special training and knowledge 
necessary to a special profession. 

On the one hand there must be the special educa- 
tion. Hippias the sophist taught that the object of 
education is to make a man sufficient for himself. He 
therefore appeared at the Olympic games boasting 



11 

that all the articles of jewelry and clothing which he 
wore were manufactured by his own hand ; at the 
same time he exhibited all sorts of poems, epic, tragic 
and lyric, and several kinds of prose composition. An 
attempt to educate a man to be sufficient for himself 
in this sense, would annihilate the division of labor 
and reduce society to barbarism. 

On the other hand, as really disastrous would be 
an education imparting exclusively the special train- 
ing and knowledge for a special art or profession. 

The college, then, aims to effect a systematic and 
harmonious discipline of the whole man, and thus to 
prepare the student for the special study and training 
necessary to fit him for his special business in life. 
He is not shut up by his college education to one of 
the so called learned professions, but is trained as a 
man so as the more readily to master any business, and 
in whatever business to possess stronger powers, a 
better balanced mind, a richer culture, and a broader 
sympathy with all true minds and true learning in 
other professions. 

This being the idea of a college, its prime and 
dominating end must be, not to impart knowledge, 
but to strengthen and discipline the mind, to put the 
man in possession of himself, and to enable him with 
the greatest facility to achieve the greatest and best re- 
sults. It is not to bloat the man with a plethory of 
learning, leaving him flabby in organization, slow, fee- 
ble and awkward in movement ; but to train him to 



12 

the development of intellectual muscle, to quickness, 
power and dexterity in intellectual action. 

First, physical culture must not be neglected. But 
here observe that it does not belong to the college to 
train the senses to the special uses, and the hand to 
the special dexterity necessary in special pursuits. 
Such training belongs to professional schools, to 
schools of the arts, and to apprenticeship to trades. 
Nor does it belong to the college to train men to the 
highest development of muscle, of agility or speed ; 
for such training belongs only to the professional ath- 
lete and acrobat. This is an extraordinary training 
of special powers, incompatible with the full-orbed 
and harmonious development of the man, and un- 
favorable to the greatest health and longevity, and to 
the best intellectual advancement. No people ever 
gave more prominence to physical culture than the 
Greeks ; yet Plato insists that the training of an ath- 
lete must not be permitted in the education of the 
young. He says that the athletes are intellectually a 
sluggish set, who doze away their lives, and that they 
are of dubious and unreliable health. He therefore 
insists that the gymnastic training of the young should 
be more simple and moderate, and recommends mili- 
tary drill. 

Physical culture must also be kept in subordina- 
tion to intellectual. If it absorbs the interest and 
energy that should be devoted to study, it frustrates 
its own design and makes the whole college course 



13 

nugatory. There should be that degree and kind of 
physical culture which are essential to vigorous health ; 
so as to insure the greatest serenity of spirit, capacity 
for work and power of endurance ; so as to dispel 
despondency and gloom, exhaling like mists from the 
man's own disordered liver ; so that he may not break 
down under the first strain accompanying the severer 
exigencies of life ; so that it may be every day a joy 
to live and work. ' Other things being equal, the 
healthy man is the happiest and makes others the 
happiest ; he is the more pleasant husband and father, 
the more generous friend, the cheerer and helper of 
the sad; in every position and relation the whole- 
some man. He radiates joy. Health, as the per- 
petual spring of animation and energy, is the first re- 
quisite of success. It must never be out of sight in 
the administration of a college. 

The college must also train the intellect so as to 
give it both strength and dexterity. There are three 
kinds of intellectual power, thought, expression, exe- 
cution. By the pre-eminence of one or the other of 
these the regal minds of the race are characterized. 
The college must train them all. 

There is first the power of thought. Ordinary 
scholars may not enlarge the bounds of human know- 
ledge by discovery, nor originate thoughts which the 
world will not willingly let die. But since they ought 
to be, in their respective spheres, the " Carolines rerum" 
on which events and actions turn, they must be 



14 

trained to original and independent thought — original 
in the only sense in which originality is possible to or- 
dinary minds, that they have looked at things with 
their own eyes; — independent, because they do not 
receive their opinions from others but have thought 
out conclusions for themselves. They must be able 
to see the significance and bearing of events, look 
through appearances to reality, detect the errors of 
popular opinion, and be wise counsellors of the people. 
The first aim, then, is to make the student a thinker; 
to train him to attend fixedly and long, to observe, 
discriminate and define, to analyze, compare and com- 
bine, to weigh evidence and reach just conclusions ; 
that his mind may be, not a warehouse filled with 
bales of facts, but a growing germ, organizing ma- 
terial into its own substance and force, as an acorn or- 
ganizes the soil, water and air into a living oak. 

The second kind of intellectual power is that of 
expression ; the power of communicating, vindicating 
and enforcing thought. It is the power of the teacher, 
the orator and the author. The training of this power 
is the special object of one department of college in- 
struction, and should not be overlooked in any. The 
study of language, though distinct from the depart- 
ment of rhetoric, is the study of the instrument of 
expression, giving that scientific knowledge of the his- 
tory, significance and relations of words, and of the 
combinations and possibilities of language, which is an 
unseen but effective help to precision and power of 



15 

speech. And every translation — and indeed recita- 
tions in other departments — should be an exercise in 
using simple, perspicuous, precise and terse language. 

Next is the power of applying and combining 
thought in executive and administrative action. This 
is the power of the inventor, the reformer, the gen- 
eral, and the statesman ; also of the lawyer, physician 
and clergyman, using science, skill and training for the 
uses of daily life. This power must not be neglected. 
Philosophy formerly was contemplative and not active,, 
withdrawing from action to academic shades and to 
retreats of learning. Barrow in his Greek Professor- 
ship called himself an "Attic owl driven out from the 
society of all other birds." But at this day and in 
America every scholar should be a worker. All thought 
is to be transformed into life. An education which 
makes a man only a book-worm, which unfits him for 
the activities of life, is a failure. The philosophy of 
America must be the Peripatetic. From the nature of 
the case, special training for special lines of business 
must be in the professional schools. But this grand ob- 
ligation of every scholar to a life of action must con- 
trol the whole college curriculum, so that the student 
acquire that facility in handling all his faculties and 
acquisitions, which will fit him to succeed in any line 
of action, industrial, military, political or professional. 

Argument is superfluous to demonstrate that this 
is the result of a right college training, and of the 
training actually given at Bowdoin, since we are 



16 

honored with the presence of his Excellency the 
Governor, distinguished at once as scholar, general 
and statesman. 

They, therefore, greatly mistake, who estimate the 
value of the college course by the amount of learning 
which it imparts ; by the number of facts stored in 
memory which the man can afterwards make use of 
in his farm, workshop or office. Much more do they 
mistake who suppose that the chief value of the four 
years at college is in the opportunity for general read- 
ing and that acquaintance with English literature 
which one can comfortably acquire in his easy chair. 
It is the object of a college to make men. It is an 
old and classic illustration, when you give a sheep 
grass, you do not expect it to return grass, but wool. 
So when you give a youth instruction you do not ex- 
pect him to return learning, but manhood; not the 
crude and undigested facts received, but a mind strong, 
disciplined and dextrous in the use of all its powers, 
and rich in culture. 

I have spoken of physical and intellectual training. 
But as physical training is subordinate to intellectual, 
so both are subordinate to moral and spiritual ends. 
The importance of this part of education has been 
urged by the greatest educators and the greatest 
minds in all ages. In reading the thoughts of the 
Emperor M. A. Antoninus one is impressed by the 
earnestness with which through nearly twenty open- 
ing sections he enumerates the successive influences 



17 

which had established him in various moral principles 
and expresses his gratitude for them. Plato in his 
system of. education for his model republic dwells at 
great length on the same branch of culture. Napo- 
leon Bonaparte has left his testimony that religion is 
the foundation of education. Daniel Webster has said 
that the Christian religion is " of the essence, the vi- 
tality of useful instruction." " Hence, since the intro- 
duction of Christianity, it has been the duty, as it has 
been the effort of the great and good, to sanctify hu- 
man knowledge, to bring it to the font and baptize 
learning into Christianity, to gather up all its produc- 
tions, its earliest and its latest, its blossoms and its 
fruits, and lay them all upon the altar of religion and 
virtue." And mark the reverence and devoutness of 
the greatest minds in scientific investigations. Listen 
to Kepler: "I give thee thanks, Lord and Creator, that 
thou hast given me delight in thy creation, and I have 
exulted in the work of thy hands. I have revealed to 
mankind the glory of thy works, as far as my limited 
mind could take in that infinite glory." "If I have 
given forth anything that is unworthy of thee, or if I 
have sought my own fame, wilt thou, gracious and 
merciful, forgive me." Hear Linnaeus in his researches 
among the plants: "Deum sempitemum, omniscium, omni- 
jpotentem, a tergo transeunte?n, vidi, et obstupui" Hear Lord 
Bacon, joining this choir of kingly worshippers : 
" Thou, therefore, father, who gavest the visible light 

as the first fruits of the creation, and at the comple- 
3 



18 

tion of thy works didst inspire the countenance of 
man with intellectual light, guard and direct this work, 
which proceeding from thy bounty, seeks in return 
thy glory." " If we labor in thy works, thou wilt 
make us partakers of thy vision and of thy Sabbath. 
We pray that this mind may abide in us ; and that 
by our hands and the hands of others to whom thou 
shalt impart the same mind, thou wilt be pleased to 
endow with new gifts the family of man." 

We are in sympathy, then, with the great masters 
of learning, as well as with Jesus and the apostles, when 
we demand that education aim pre-eminently to culti- 
vate the moral and spiritual side of man's being, and 
to establish, strengthen and settle the pupil in the 
principles and practice of Christian character. 

We meet, indeed, a difficulty growing out of the 
multiplicity of denominations. The difficulty is safely 
met in the common school, by leaving the distinctive 
religious instruction to the parents. But it cannot be 
met in the same way at college, for, the pupils being 
away from home, it would deprive them of religious 
instruction during the four most formative years of life. 
To the innumerable evils arising from sectarian jeal- 
ousy we must not add this more fatal than all, of 
making college education unchristian through fear lest 
in teaching Christianity, we seem to teach sectarian-, 
ism. That would be to sacrifice our own sons to the 
demon. That could be justified only by a sectarianism 
gQ intense that it would leave the educated intellect of 



19 

the country unchristian rather than have it Christian 
in any sect not our own. The difficulty has been met 
by a common consent that every college have a de^ 
nominational character in the sense that its religious 
instruction accord with some one denomination. In 
this sense Harvard, Brown, Amherst, Yale, and in fact 
every college in N. England, and almost every one in 
the United States, is denominational. In the same 
sense and no other Bowdoin has always had a de- 
nominational character. That character has been the 
same from the beginning. I know no desire or pur- 
pose in any quarter to make its character in this re- 
spect in the future any other than it has always been 
in the past. But while every college is in this sense 
denominational, no college ought to be sectarian, or 
be made an engine for propagating sectarian narrow^ 
ness and animosity. The tendency of high culture is 
always to enlarge the views, to liberalize the feelings, 
to purge away partizan bias, passion and prejudice. 
A college would be perverted from the high ends of 
liberal education, to say nothing of Christian culture, 
if made an engine of sectarian zeal or political fac- 
tion. Especially at this time, when the united ener- 
gies of all Christians are needed to counteract the 
powerful influences undermining all Christian faith, 
and when the whole Christian community is yearning 
for union and co-operation, the young must be edu- 
cated to the large heartedness as well as to the devoted* 
ness and earnestness of Christian love. The instruc- 



20 

tion should be, as President Woolsey in his Inaugural 
expressed his views of religious instruction at Yale, in 
" a theology so liberal — if that might be — as not to 
pertain to the party but to universal Christianity, and 
so majestic in its outline as to commend itself to the 
consciousness and make it own the presence of God." 

I add, in opposition to the current opinion, that the 
moral and religious interests of a young man are pro- 
bably safer in college than in any other situation in 
which young men are congregated away from home. 
I make this assertion after long observation, and I am 
sure that facts sustain it. It has been estimated — I 
know not with what correctness — that one in four of 
the young men who go into business in the cities, 
come to ruin financially and morally. Compare a 
New England college with an equal number of young 
men in the shops and stores of any street of a city, 
you will find in college less of the mean vices of pil- 
fering and lying, less of nightly revels and degrading 
sensuality ; you will find a smaller proportion who, 
virtuous at coming, become morally corrupted ; and a. 
larger proportion whose moral character is improved, 
who rise to a higher sense of honor, who are rescued 
from corruption to which before entering they had 
been tending, or who are renovated to Christian faith 
and love. 

Training, then, is the first and dominant design of 
collegiate education ; training that produces the hap- 
piest development of the physical, intellectual and 
moral powers. 



21 

The second design is to impart knowledge. A well 
arranged college course will impart the largest amount 
of useful knowledge possible in securing the most com- 
plete mental discipline. 

But the value of the college course in this respect 
does not consist so much in the amount of knowledge 
as in its quality. 

Observe, first, that the student is so far initiated 
into the various great spheres of learning as to awaken 
an interest in them and a desire to prosecute them 
further. Whatever his subsequent profession, he will 
be in sympathy with all literature and science, will be 
an intelligent and interested observer of the progress 
of thought and discovery, and a man of large and 
liberal culture. 

Observe, secondly, that the college has given him 
a knowledge of principles and methods, rather than of 
details. And one principle is worth a thousand facts ; 
and a method is a key to science. 

Observe, next, that the knowledge acquired is 
scientific rather than popular, and this gives the stu- 
dent a solid basis for enlarging his knowledge of ap- 
plications and results. 

Observe, also, that the student has acquired the 
knowledge and use of languages and of mathematics 
which are instruments of investigation available in all 
his subsequent life. 

When the quality of the knowledge acquired in 
college is appreciated, it will be evident that this 



22 

second part of the work accomplished is of vast con- 
sequence. 

III. Methods of realizing the idea of collegiate education. 

First, I must speak of government and discipline. 

No community can prosper without the main- 
tenance of order by the enforcement of law. Yet all 
admit that the maintenance of discipline is the one 
great difficulty in administering a college. In the re- 
cent discussions respecting reform in Harvard univer- 
sity, it has been intimated that the result of discipline 
there has been to throw the students and faculty 
into antagonism as hostile parties in perpetual feud. 
It has even been suggested that the attempt to main- 
tain college government be abandoned as impractica- 
ble, and the students be left amenable only to the civil 
law. The example of the European universities is 
not to be ajDpealed to in support of this, since they 
correspond to our professional schools rather than to 
our colleges. Certainly the New England mind will 
not consent to this in collegiate education. The diffi- 
culty probably originates less in the administration of 
college government than in the state of society, the 
decay of family government, the neglect to cultivate 
subordination and respectfulness in the young, and the 
forgetfulness of the maxim that no one knows how to 
command till he has first learned to obey. Colleges 
are not to be blamed for failing to accomplish results 
which the constant and irresistible influences of society 
render impossible. 



23 

I do not intend to discuss this subject in full. I 
propose merely to call attention to one aspect of it, 
which has not received due attention from American 
educators. ' 

There are two principles, not contradictory but 
complements of each other, opposite poles of truth, 
both necessary to the complete circuit of thought 
on the subject. Held separately they lead to two sys- 
tems of educational discipline, each erroneous because 
expressing only a half truth. I may best exhibit 
them by historical instances. 

The first is exemplified in the education given by 
the Jesuits to those who were trained for the service 
of the order, This was almost exclusively discipline, 
severe and protracted exercises through which the 
pupil was required to pass, not to store his mind with 
knowledge, or to train him to think, reason, and speak, 
but to discipline him to subordination, to the submis- 
sion of his will without question to his superiors, to 
entire consecration to the interests of the order, to 
the abandonment of ease, sloth, pleasure and luxury, 
and to contempt of hardship, poverty, toil, suffering 
and death in its service. Here was a system which 
deliberately imposed the severest artificial restraints 
and hardships on the pupils on purpose to train them 
to endure hardness. The success of this training the 
history of Jesuit missions demonstrates. 

The other principle in its exclusive application is 
exemplified in the account which Montaigne gives 



24 

of his own education. His father, he tells us, " had 
been advised to make me relish science and duty by 
an unforced will and of my own voluntary motion, 
and to educate my soul in all liberty *ancl delight 
without any severity or constraint." Accordingly to 
save him from the drudgery of learning, his attendants 
spoke only Latin, that he might acquire the language 
as a vernacular. " As to Greek, of which I have but 
little smattering, my father also designed to have 
taught it me by art, but in a new way and as a sort of 
sport; tossing out declensions to and fro, after the 
manner of those who by certain games at tables and 
chess learn geometry and arithmetic." The servants 
were forbidden to awake him in the morning, but a 
musician was provided to play soft music as he waked, 
that his mind might be serene when he arose. "By 
which example," he says, "you may judge of the rest." 
Hence resulted his marked disinclination to encounter 
toil or hardship, the busy idleness of his whole life, 
and his incapacity to appreciate the battle of human 
life against ignorance and wickedness. 

The latter is becoming the type of modern educa- 
tion. Says Mr. Youmans: "The free and healthy 
exercise of the faculties is so pleasurable as universally 
to be spoken of as play. Who then, has a right to 
turn it into dreary and repulsive work? The love of 
enjoyment is the deepest and most powerful impulse 
of our nature, and the educational' system which does 
not recognize and build upon it, violates the highest 



25 

claim of that nature." Most true ; and yet but a half 
truth. For life is not play, but work. It cannot be 
made all pleasurable, but must involve for the accom- 
plishment of its high ends painful self-denial, sacrifice 
and toil. No education fits a man for real life which 
does not train him to endure hardness, to scorn idle- 
ness, enervation and luxury, to forego ease and indul- 
gence, to accept toil for the accomplishment of high 
ends. The command to self-denial has never been re- 
pealed ; the acceptance of it can never cease to be 
the condition of entering into life. 

The error of the Mediaeval education was that it 
was ascetic in the bad sense which that word has ac- 
quired. But there is a proper askhsis an "exercis- 
ing" of the soul in conquering difficulties, bearing re- 
straints, enduring hardness and loss, sacrificing pleasure 
and drudging through tasks for high ends, without 
which the soul can never be master of its highest 
strength nor realize its highest greatness. All who 
have achieved the most have exhibited this power — 
witness the ancient Romans, the Saracens, the Puritans. 

Every right system of education must provide this 
true askesis, this exercise and discipline which shall 
train the man to simplicity of character, purity and 
elavation of desires, and earnestness of purpose. It 
must produce men who live to achieve, not to enjoy; 
whose joy is in work, not in indulgence. Otherwise 
education produces only weaklings, whose only con- 
cern is their own comfort ; whose highest end in life 



26 

is to have a good time ; Sybarites at last who kill the 
cocks that their slumber may not be disturbed, and 
banish the smiths because they cannot endure the 
noise, and who cannot sleep at night if the rose leaves 
lie too thick on them. And this askesis is as indispen- 
sable today as ever in all right training. 

How then is it to be secured ? Not by abandon- 
ing discipline, but by clearing it from its errors. The 
ascetic training of the Jesuit aimed to regulate thought 
and to make the mind and will submissive to authority. 
Our askesis must aim to make a man a thinker, inde- 
pendent in thought and action, but reverently sub- 
missive to truth and right ; and in obedience thereto 
freely consecrated to God in the service of man. The 
mediseval asceticism was imposed by authority ; ours 
must be accepted freely through interest in the noblest 
ends. The ancient asceticism imposed artificial re- 
straints, privations and sufferings for the purpose of 
training men to hardness ; ours must not be artificial 
but natural, accordant with the discipline which life 
itself imposes on every man ; rejoicing in every gift 
of God as good, and accepting the discipline simply as 
incidental to the achievements on which the heart is 
bent. In real life nothing is offered gratis. Nature 
sells,, and always at the value price. The disciplkie 
of a college should be simply the conformity of the 
college to this great law of nature and of life. 

Therefore there should be no artificial regulations 
creating offences which but for the rules would not 



27 

have been offences. Where numbers are prosecuting 
studies together there must necessarily be fixed hours 
for college exercises, and fixed hours of study when, 
for the common convenience, the colleges and grounds 
shall be quiet and studies may be prosecuted without 
interruption. Beyond this the young man in college 
should be held to the same law which governs all hu- 
man life ; he must be held to truthfulness, sincerity, 
justice, kindness, honor, integrity, in action and spirit ; 
to gentlemanliness and courtesy; to diligence and 
energy in study and the concentration of all his powers 
on gaining that high education which is the immediate 
object of the college life. For that end he must be 
content to forego ease and indulgence and to work 
with all his might. All requirements of constant and 
punctual attendance, all assignment of studies easy or 
hard, all stimulus and pressure to bring out his ener- 
gies and make him accomplish the utmost consistent 
with health, he must accept, not as the arbitrary regu- 
lation of college, but simply as the enforcement in col- 
lege of the great law of nature and of life that value 
must be paid for ; that the good of life is gained only 
by toil and self-denial. " Buy the truth." 

If any student is persistently idle, if he falls into 
dissipation or other vice, if he habitually disturbs 
the quiet and order of the college, if he violates the 
rights of his fellow students or trespasses on the pro- 
perty or peace of the community, and will not heed 
admonition, he must be dismissed. Thus the same 



28 

laws of propriety and virtue rule in college which rule 
in society at large ; the law which in college requires 
punctuality, self-restraint, diligence and energy, is the 
law which requires the same in actual life. Thus the 
whole college course will be a constant appeal to all 
the best sentiments of the heart, and a constant train- 
ing to self-government; and to self-denying and ener- 
getic work. And he who has not acquired this ca- 
pacity must be in society a useless thing ; and when 
he dies nobody will mourn that the earth is relieved 
of the burden of his support. 

The course of study has also been under discus- 
sion, and great changes have been demanded. 

The demand that increased attention be given to 
the natural sciences is reasonable. The recent expan- 
sion of knowledge in this direction has been so great, 
that a collegiate education cannot be complete, nor 
adapted to the times, which does not introduce the 
student to these sciences. They provide also a pecu- 
liar intellectual discipline ; they train the powers of 
observation, of discrimination and classification ; they 
educate in inductive reasoning; they hold the mind 
rigorously to facts ; they restrain, or at least ought to 
restrain the tendency to fanciful speculation and theo- 
rising. Although I am constrained to say that if seek- 
ing through all the history of speculation for the most 
striking instance of the inverted pyramid, the broadest 
theory on the smallest apex of fact, I should find it 
among the shifting scientific theories of cosmology 



29 

and paleontology. It may be added, that the basis 
of mathematics which underlies many of these stud- 
ies necessitates in them a mathematical discipline. 
Therefore aside from the knowledge acquired, these 
studies are important to supplement other studies in 
securing a complete and harmonious intellectual disci- 
pline. 

I heartily agree with the modern demand for a 
more extended course in natural science. And yet I 
object to it, as actually urged, that it is but a half 
truth, and as such tends to evil. There are three 
great spheres of human thought, Nature, Man, and 
God. My objection to the demand under considera- 
tion is that in effect it acknowledges only the first of 
these and allows no proper proportion of attention to 
the other two. Thus it tends always to the fatal doc- 
trine that the knowledge of matter and of physical 
force is the only knowledge useful or possible to man. 

First, in claiming that the knowledge of these 
branches is pre-eminently useful knowledge, an inade- 
quate idea of utility is involved. If that only is use- 
ful which aids in feeding, clothing and sheltering man, 
then indeed the knowledge of natural science is the 
only useful knowledge ; then all useful knowledge 
may be included under the German designation Brod- 
wissenschaft, which may be translated, a Bread and but- 
ter science " ; and the tendency to materialism becomes 
inevitable and irresistible. 

But the highest product of the earth is not corn 



30 

and cotton, but man. The highest end of education 
is to elevate and develop man. The true utility con- 
sists in promoting this high end. 

Even if we give the widest scope to the common 
argument from the utility of the natural sciences, it 
acknowledges as useful only that which supplies exist- 
ing human wants, and overlooks the prior necessity of 
so developing the man that he may have wants large, 
manifold, pure and elevated, which discovery and in- 
vention may meet. This is the prime and fundamen- 
tal utility. 

In truth the first named utility is subordinate to 
and dependent on this second and true utility. Of 
what use to multiply inventions and facilities of pro- 
duction while man is capable only of the hideous 
pleasures of savage life? The wants of the savage 
are so few and so gross, his desires are so brutish and 
his pleasures so disgusting, that knowledge and art 
have but the most limited scope in which they can 
minister to his wants. The man himself must first be 
developed. The civilized man is many times more a 
man than the savage. We say he has more wants. 
That is because he is more developed ; he has become 
many sided ; his tastes have been purified ; his desires 
have been multiplied and elevated; the sources of in- 
terest and avenues of enjoyment have become manifold 
more numerous. Nature touches him at a thousand- 
fold more points than the savage, and c*an give him a 
thousand-fold more and better blessings. Therefore the 



31 

prime necessity and highest utility is the development 
of the man. 

The same argument may be drawn from a com- 
parison of civilized men. How limited the scope in 
which knowledge and art could have been useful to 
Nero, who, with the resources of the Roman Empire 
at his sole command to suck it dry as a man sucks an 
orange, was yet capable of obtaining from all the 
riches of the world only the sordid pleasures of in- 
temperance and the horrid pleasures of cruelty. Even 
in civilization, therefore, the degree to which know- 
ledge can be useful to a man, depends on the develop- 
ment and culture of the man ; as the degree to which 
sunshine and rain can bless a soil depends on the rich- 
ness and culture of the soil. 

The history of science and art in all ages presents 
facts in confirmation. It is true of many modern in- 
ventions and discoveries that they had been found 
out by some thinker generations before they came 
into use, but dropped into oblivion again because 
society was not sufficiently advanced, that is, man was 
not sufficiently developed to need or to use them. 
From the days of Archimedes until now, discoveries 
and inventions have been falling on society and perish- 
ing without fruit, like seed incapable of germinating, 
and obliged to perish, because thrown upon a rock. 

Therefore, I repeat, the highest utility consists in 
the development of man himself. We may say it is 
the one fundamental utility ; because it is only as this 



32 

development is realized that science and art find scope 
to be useful to man. 

If so, then the natural sciences have no exclusive 
or even pre-eminent claim to be useful knowledge, or 
to be the exclusive or even the pre-eminent studies in 
education. If man is the highest product of the earth, 
if his development is the grandest end, then the study 
of man must be equal in dignity and importance to 
the study of that which merely ministers to his exist- 
ing wants : and we may re-assert in this century what 
was a truism in the last ; " The proper study of man- 
kind is man." On the ground of utility alone I claim 
the higher place for the study of man himself; those 
studies fitly called "the humanities" ; the great courses 
of human thought ; the questions which have occu- 
pied the human mind ; the jDroducts of human genius; 
the progress and characteristics of civilization; the 
conditions and laws of individual action and of the 
constitution and welfare of society. 

And if so, then the knowledge of human lan- 
guages and literature is pre-eminently useful know- 
ledge; for it is pre-eminently the knowledge of man. 
Comparative Philology is a sort of geology of human 
thought. In the study of languages the student digs 
through the strata in which the opinions, the religion, 
the politics, the social customs of the past have been 
deposited. Single words are petrified thoughts, fossils 
perpetuating some peculiar formation in the life of a 
distant age. Why is not this knowledge as useful as 



33 

the knowledge of the deposition of sand and gravel 
in the ages before human history began ? Literature 
is the consummate flower and fruit of the human 
mind, the product of the greatest geniuses which have 
made the history of the race illustrious. In these 
studies, also, a student best masters his own language, 
and acquires the power of expressing his own thoughts. 

The language and literature of Greece and Kome 
are by universal consent among the most important. 
In them we come in contact with the human mind in 
its most formative and influential periods. The civili- 
zation of Greece and Eome have been determinant 
forces in the formation of our modern civilization ; and 
with the civilization of the Hebrews, fused together 
under the power of Christianity mightier than all 
three, still penetrate our civilization as they do our 
language, with elements of abiding power. What a 
blank would be made in the mind of any highly edu- 
cated person, if there were struck out at a dash all the 
knowledge, the culture, the refinement and enlarge- 
ment of thought, the intellectual strength acquired 
from contact with the Greek and Eoman mind. 

Herbert Spencer objects, I know, that the dead 
facts of human history are useless. I reply, that all 
facts are useless, except as their significance is seen 
through their relation to some principle, law or end. 
They lie like heaps of broken granite, mere rubbish, till 
the mind of the architect constructs them into a tem- 
ple j till the Orphic music of a master thought makes 
5 



34 

them move and range themselves harmoniously in the 
grand and beautiful whole. So the facts of meteorolo- 
gy lie accumulated in huge volumes of recorded ob- 
servations, meaningless as the incongruous images 
of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, waiting the Daniel who 
shall tell us their significance. But this is no more 
true of the facts of human than of natural history. 
A dead man is no more dead than a dead dog. If 
we must compare the value of mere facts, why is 
not the knowledge that Csesar crossed the Rubicon 
as useful as the knowledge of the average weight 
of the human brain? The knowledge of the migra- 
tions of men and the founding of empires as useful as 
the knowledge of the movements of great glaciers in 
an immeasurably distant geological epoch? Why are 
we not as much benefited by knowing the names of 
Aristides and Socrates, of Cato and Brutus, as by 
learning to call a certain shell fish no longer a clam, 
but a Mi/a Arenaria ? And why is not a knowledge of 
mythology, which Spencer especially ridicules, being 
the knowledge of the action of the human mind on 
the great subject of religion, as capable of use as the 
knowledge of the monstrous shapes and names of 
Pentacrinite, Ichthyosaurus, Megalosaurus, and all the 
" chimaeras dire " of geology ? 

I accept, then, the test of utility. I agree with 
Milton, 

" That not to know at large of things remote 
From use, obscure and subtle ; but to know 
That which before us lies in daily life, 
Is the prime wisdom." 



35 

Yet I insist that man is himself the highest product of 
the earth ; that his development is the highest end of 
education ; that the utility which consists in satisfying 
existing wants is inferior and subordinate to the prime 
utility which consists in developing; purifying and en- 
nobling the man ; and that in any view of the subject 
a knowledge of the languages, history and literature 
of man is at least as useful as a knowledge of nature. 
It may be argued in reply that even for the high- 
est end of education, natural science is the more efc 
fective. Admitting that the utility of knowledge is 
to be tested, not merely by its bearing on the supply 
of existing wants, but on the development, purification 
and ennobling of man, it may be contended that the 
knowledge of nature is still pre-eminently the useful 
knowledge. But this admission changes the whole 
question; it rectifies the one-sided and inadequate 
view of utility, which constitutes a fallacy in the argu- 
ment and necessitates a tendency to materialism. 
When the question is thus put, the same correct test 
of utility being appealed to on each side, the respective 
claims of the different departments of knowledge can 
be adjudicated. I will only throw out a single thought 
bearing on this adjudication. The facts of history dis- 
prove Comte's theory that the progress of the human 
mind has always been by successive steps from Theolo- 
gy to Metaphysics and thence to Natural Science ; for 
these have always been co-existent factors of civiliza- 
tion. But history does demonstrate that in the earlier 



36 

periods of civilization, romance and poetry, aesthetics 
and literature, rhetoric, logic, and language, ethics and 
politics, metaphysics and theology, were much larger 
factors in the education of the race than natural science ; 
and that the same continued to be the fact up to 
the most recent centuries. And the civilization 
which produced Homer and Virgil, Socrates, Plato, 
and Aristotle, Pericles, and Julius Cassar, has some- 
thing to say for itself as to its capacity to develop 
man. Confessedly the natural sciences have become 
prominent factors in the education of the race only in 
the last period of its progress. Even during the last 
two centuries as much of human thought has been ex- 
pended on the study of man and God as on the study 
of nature ; education in the schools has continued to 
this day to be principally in those studies; and the 
most eminent naturalists owe their own discipline and 
training first to them. 

Now let it be observed that education must guide 
the development of every child from the incapacity, 
ignorance and rudeness of barbarism up to the highest 
civilization — each child passing through in its own 
progress the entire progress of the race — and it is 
reasonable to infer that the same order of studies by 
which God has educated the race will be the order 
most effective to educate the individual. Such in sub- 
stance has been the order of educational influences 
which either the wisdom or the instinct of man has 
adopted. And until babes shall begin to be born civi- 



37 

lized men and women, there will be no reason, even 
in the nineteenth century, to change substantially this 
order, but only to perfect and improve the details. 

A second objection against the argument for a 
larger attention to the natural sciences is its tendency 
—I speak of a tendency involved, rather than of a 
theory avowed — to make education only a special 
training for a special work, and to overlook the pre- 
vious general training which gives development and 
culture to the man. The argument constantly urged, 
that education from the beginning must consist in the 
acquisition of knowledge that is to be used in the 
special work of life, has force only on the premise that 
all education is a special training for a special work. 
This false theory of education is latent in the argu- 
ment. Indeed, in Comte's system it is not latent. At 
an early age the special adaptation of the child is to 
be determined by a phrenological examination by state 
officials ; thenceforward he is to be taken from his pa- 
rents, and educated for that special trade or business. 

To see how pernicious this error is, notice, first, that 
after all the broader culture of the college there are 
certain isolating, one-sided, narrowing influences, a 
certain professional smack and odor, inseparable from 
every special profession, trade or business ; a certain 
incapacity, also, to appreciate the knowledge, skill, diffi- 
culties, work and worth of other pursuits. If now the 
training of the college be omitted, and instead, educa- 
tion from the beginning be a special training for a 



38 

special work, these narrowing influences will be in- 
tolerably intensified. If a person is to spend life in 
making pins, and his entire education has consisted in 
acquiring the knowledge and skill necessary for that 
business, the result is that the man disappears, and a 
pin-maker alone remains. If the same theory of edu- 
cation be universally adopted, then in the multitude 
of artisans and professional drudges, we shall need 
Diogenes' lamp to find a man. 

Here comes in sight another fatal tendency of this 
error. It is argued that education must be the teach- 
ing of the knowledge and skill which are to be used 
in the special business of life. This argument has 
force only on the premise that the artisan is of more 
consequence than the man ; that the highest end of 
education is to produce the skill of the artisan, not 
the excellence of the man. Thence it follows that the 
product of work is of more value than the workman. 
Thence, in one line of inference, it follows that the 
workman may be sacrificed to multiply the products 
of his labor ; all assertions of the dignity and rights 
of labor, of the sacreclness of humanity, of inaliena- 
ble rights are silenced ; the door is open for the re- 
entry of slavery or any enforced service which prom- 
ises to multiply products. 

In another line of inference it follows that since 
the highest end is the multiplication of products, all 
utility lies in that direction, and the farthest scope and 
Iiighest end of civilization is limited to the material. 



39 

Here we come in sight of two systems of civiliza- 
tion struggling already in the womb of time for the 
birthright of precedence and lordship in the future — 
systems contrasted long ago by Jesus — the one that 
man lives by bread alone ; the other, that he lives by 
the word of God; — the one, which affirms with Comte 
that man must abandon his claim to be the lowest of 
the angels and must be content henceforth to rank as 
the highest of the beasts ; the other, which acknow- 
ledges him as spiritual and immortal, in the image of 
God; — the one, which sees utility only in the multi- 
plication of products, and, sinking the man in the arti- 
san, appoints him to moil and fatten "where wealth 
accumulates and men decay"; the other, which subor- 
dinates all to man's intellectual, aesthetic, social and 
spiritual culture ; — the one, which with Lord Bacon 
recognizes man in his highest exaltation as no more 
than the minister and interpreter, that is, the servant 
and student of nature ; the other, which with Kepler 
recognizes the student and interpreter of nature as 
also the student and interpreter of the divine mind, 
reading God's thoughts after him , and, with the Bible, 
recognizes man not as the servant but the Lord of na- 
ture, appointed to possess its resources and to compel 
the service of its forces ; — the one, which explains all 
human progress as the result of physical forces, de- 
veloping according to their necessary law ; the other, 
which regards it as the result of spiritual energies 
originating in God's love, expressing the action of his 



40 

grace, establishing on earth a kingdom of righteous- 
ness and peace, renovating the earth by and for man, 
and installing him in that lordship over nature for 
which he was created. 

I insist that in the conflict of civilizations, all right 
education must be unmistakably and emphatically pro- 
nounced on the side of the latter against the former. 
I object to the plea for the natural sciences and against 
the humanities in education that so often there are 
arguments which have no validity and appeals which 
have no force, except by admitting as premises princi- 
ciples which legitimately lead to a materialistic civili- 
zation. 

I need not draw on my own imagination to depict 
this type of civilization ; for Comte has fully delineated 
it. For example, he insists that the stellar astronomy, 
as the investigation of binary stars, ought not to be 
studied because it is not available for practical use — 
making of no account the inextinguishable interest of 
the soul in truth for its own sake, and all the higher 
uses of such investigations in quickening the imagina- 
tion, elevating the thoughts, and enlarging our ideas 
of the glory of the universe and of God. In that 
state of society which Comte depicts as the highest 
civilization, the man is educated to be an artisan and is 
lost in the artisan; he is of less value than his pro- 
ducts, and, if it is needful, is to be sacrificed to multi- 
ply them ; he is the tool of the state, having no rights 
but only owing duties ; the modern doctrines of hu- 



41 

man rights and civil liberty are ridiculous errors ; the 
State is a hierarchy of savans, determining despotically 
every person's business, regulating the minutiae of con- 
duct, and like the Inquisition, carrying its dictation 
and espionage into the sphere of opinion and con- 
science and into all the privacy of life ; love is regu- 
lated by the State ; the glow of passion and the free- 
dom of impulse are suppressed, nobleness of character 
and heroism of action are made impossible; indi- 
viduality is lost in the monotony of a universal and 
regulated productiveness; and even the creation of 
value and the acquisition of property, while it is the 
highest end of life, is yet restrained from kindling pas- 
sion or awakening desire. This is his boasted autruism 
with which he caricatures Christian love — in name 
that a man lives for others — in reality that he is the 
tool of the State for the production of value. In such 
a civilization Mother Goose and Fairy tales must give 
place to useful knowledge in the nursery. All the ro- 
mance of life, which is like the bloom on the plum 
and the down on the peach, must be rubbed off; and 
the spring, freedom and variety of life give place to 
calculating prudence and frigid regulation. J. S. Mill 
himself takes note of this already discernible tendency. 
He says, "The chivalrous spirit has nowadays almost 
disappeared from our books of education. For the 
first time in history the young of both sexes are grow- 
ing up unromantic." There results at last an inca- 



• 



42 

pacity even to comprehend the loftier enthusiasm and 
the deeper springs of human action ; as Voltaire could 
account for the Protestant Reformation only as the 
result of a quarrel between the Augustinian and Do- 
minican monks. This is the vision of the good time 
coming, according to the gospel of the Positive Phi- 
losophy. And when it has fully come, we may expect 
the women to dispense with useless ornaments and 
have interest tables printed on their aprons ; and then 
may be realized, in accordance with what Herbert 
Spencer urges, the substitution in the course of study 
for young men in college of a treatise on hygiene in- 
stead of Greek, and a treatise on the rearing of chil- 
dren instead of Latin. 

I do not speak of these tendencies as belonging to 
the study of the natural sciences; but as indicated 
and involved in the current arguments for the substi- 
tution of this study for that of Latin and Greek and 
of the " humanities " in general. 

On the contrary I insist that these false arguments 
do injustice to these sciences and place them in a false 
position. I advocate increased attention to these sci- 
ences in college, not merely because they are useful 
in reference to the supply of material wants, nor 
because they secure a peculiar and necessary kind of 
intellectual discipline, but also because they enlarge 
the range of thought, awaken a new and higher interest 
in nature, and have utility in its highest sense in pro- 



43 

moting the culture and development of man and the. 
best progress of society. The Atlantic cable does not 
merely transmit the quotations of the markets, but in it 

" The hands of human brotherhood 
Are clasped beneath the sea." 

While in ancient civilization labor was servile, and the 
only scope for honorable ambition was in politics or 
war, modern discoveries and inventions have facilitated 
labor and made it honorable, have exalted private busi- 
ness into a public service, have given scope in industrial 
pursuits to the highest enterprise and genius, and are 
compelling the nations to feel a common interest as 
members of the one common family of man. 

Moreover if languages, literature and philosophy 
give to the student the thoughts of man, in natural 
science, as Kepler said and as Agassiz teaches, we read 
the thoughts of God. 

It must be added that the physical sciences in their 
latest investigations have themselves become metaphy- 
sical. The question, " What is force ? " belongs at once 
to physics and to metaphysics. In the doctrine of the 
correlation and co-ordination of forces, physical science 
becomes profoundly metaphysical. When science de- 
monstrates that all force is one, variously transmuted ; 
that heat, light and electricity are transmuted motion 
and may be transmuted back into motion, it therein 
equally demonstrates that physical science itself is 
transmuted metaphysics and may be transmuted back 



44 

into metaphysics, and even into theology. Herbert 
Spencer himself teaches that science brings us in sight 
of a force absolute, eternal and inexhaustible. Thus 
tb,e last word of physical science is the first word of 
theology. 

The irresistible conclusion is that the healthy and 
complete course of college study, whether we regard 
mental discipline or useful knowledge, is that which 
touches in due proportion the three great subjects of 
human thought, Nature, Man, and God. 

Alumni and friends of Bowdoin College, I have 
now set before you my views of the necessity, the 
idea and the methods of collegiate education. It will 
be my aim to meet these necessities and to realize this 
ideal. It is to the honor of the State that a college 
with these high aims was founded so early in what 
was then the Province of Maine. Its history has been 
one which has been an honor to the State. Its gradu- 
ates have been active and influential in all departments 
of life. No New England college can show among its 
alumni a larger proportion of men distinguished in 
literature and science, and in professional, political and 
military life. In its course of study it has always aimed 
at the substantial rather than the showy, at the real 
rather than the factitious. It has always been slow 
to adopt novelties, and yet in repeated instances has 
taken the lead in introducing changes which time and 
the general concurrence of the colleges have demon- 



45 

strated to be improvements. While in the future as 
in the past -we shall not make haste in innovations, we 
shall strive to keep abreast of the progress of society, 
and to adopt all the improvements which that progress 
demands and by which it can be wisely promoted. " I 
am sure every alumnus of the college has reason to 
be proud of his Alma Mater for her record in the 
past. And I trust that they and all friends of sound 
learning will give their influence and aid to make her 
record still brighter in the future ; that while we joy- 
fully urge forward the development of the resources 
of the State and multiply our railroads, our mills and 
the product of our farms, we may in the same propor- 
tion increase our interest in education, and enlarge 
the resources of this old and honored institution. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




029 915 705 2 



